Offensive Vulgarity in an Age of Enlightenment

All are welcome to join us for the twenty-first Lewis Walpole Library Lecture, presented by Steve Bell, professional cartoonist, who will discuss Hogarth's continuing legacy for contemporary graphic satire, while also addressing the question of just how necessary it still is to offend.

Steve Bell has been drawing political comic strips for a living since 1977. He is a proponent of the short form, typically four frames. Since 1981 he has written and drawn the If… strip in the Guardian, which has run to several thousand pages, with no end in sight. Since 1990, he has been drawing four larger format political cartoons a week for the same paper. His work is unashamedly comic, but many of his cartoons are quite deliberately not funny at all. The Steve Bell cartoon website can be found online here[1].

In recent years the Lewis Walpole Library Lecture has brought noted scholars in the field of eighteenth-century studies to New Haven to speak on a topic usually related to the collection. It is now an established feature of Yale's intellectual calendar. More details about Steve's talk can be found on the Walpole Library's website.[2]